“Over here,” Pitt replied, tapping the WE SCAM monitor. Pitt had been fooling around with the zoom lens while talking and happened to catch the speeding boat flashing by. The focused image clearly showed it was the Koguryo's tender, which they had observed earlier.
“The jets definitely aren't tracking her,” Dirk said from the rear, noting the F-16s circling tightly around the Koguryo as she sailed farther to the west.
“Let's stay on her,” Pitt stated.
“She has nary a chance against our fleet wings aflutter,” Giordino snarled, pushing the throttles to full and watching as the airspeed indicator crept slowly toward 50 knots.
Why haven't they fired on the aircraft, or that infernal airship?' Tongju swore as he stared at the Koguryo through a pair of binoculars. The bouncing movement of the tender as it ran at full speed through the waves made it impossible for him to steady his gaze and he finally threw the glasses down harshly onto a cowling.
“The aircraft have intimidated Lee,” Kim said over his shoulder as he clutched the steering wheel tightly. “He will pay with his life in about two more minutes.”
The Koguryo was growing smaller on the horizon as the tender accelerated south. But when the planted explosives detonated, they could clearly see puffs of water spray into the air along the ship's hull line.
Standing on the bridge, Captain Lee at first thought that the F-16s had fired on him. But the warbirds still circled lazily above, and there was no sign that they had fired any missiles. As the damage assessments came in reporting that the lower hull was compromised in several locations, Lee suddenly realized the culprit. Minutes before, a crewman had reported observing Kim and Tongju board the tender and the small boat was now seen running south at high speed. With a sick sensation of betrayal, Lee knew that he and his ship had been deemed expendable.
But a miscalculation would save them. Kim's demolition team had planted ample explosives to rip the bowels out of a normal ship Koguryo's size. But a critical piece of information about the cable ship had not been considered: she had a double hull. The detonated charges easily ruptured the vessel's inner hull but only buckled the plates of the outer hull. Seawater gushed into the lower holds, but not with the massive force that would submerge the running ship as Tongju had envisioned. Lee immediately stopped the ship, deployed portable pumps to the damaged holds, and then sealed off the high-risk areas behind watertight doors. The ship would list and be unable to run at speed but she would not founder.
Once the flooding was halted, the captain peered through a set of field glasses at the speeding tender escaping in the distance. Lee knew that he had little to live for now. As the captain of the vessel that launched the aborted missile attack against the United States, he would be the prime scapegoat if captured. If he somehow escaped, or was released, there would be no telling what sort of reception he'd receive from Kang. Satisfied that the ship was stabilized, Lee excused himself from the bridge and retired to his cabin. Retrieving a Chinese-made Makarov 9mm pistol from beneath a dresser drawer filled with pressed shirts, Lee lay down neatly on his bed, held the barrel to his ear, and pulled the trigger.
While pursuing the speeding tender, the men in the Icarus caught sight of the series of explosions that ripped along the hull of the Koguryo. “Are those lunatics trying to scuttle her with all hands?” Dahlgren wondered.
For several minutes, they watched the ship as she slowed but held steady. Pitt noticed that there was no apparent rush for the lifeboats, and he could see several members of the crew standing idly at the rail watching the jets overhead. He studied the waterline for a significant change but could only detect a slight list.
“She's not going to disappear on us anytime soon,” he said. “Let's keep after the tender.”
Giordino glanced at the LASH system output on the laptop computer, spotting several gray shapes to the southeast approximately thirty miles away.
“Our Navy pals are on the way,” he said, tapping the screen. “They won't be alone for long.”
With a nearly 20-knot advantage in speed, the airship began easily gaining ground on the fleeing white boat. The Icarus had only ascended to a five-hundred-foot altitude when Giordino gave chase and he didn't waste power on any further climbing. The blimp glided smoothly toward the boat's wake, driving fast and low over the water. As the airship moved closer, Pitt focused the surveillance camera on the boat's open rear deck and cabin. Through the covered portico, he could only make out indiscriminate shapes at the helm.
“I count four men above decks,” he said.
“Apparently, they're not ones for a crowded escape,” Giordino replied.
Pitt scanned the camera about the deck, relieved to find no heavy armament but noting the extra drums of fuel near the stern.
“Plenty of gas for a run to Mexico,” he said.
“I think our Coast Guard friends in San Diego might have something to say about that,” Giordino replied, tightening his bearing on the boat.
Tongju and his men had been focused on the Koguryo, but one of the commandos finally noticed the approaching blimp. While Kim manned the helm, the other three men instinctively stepped to the rear open deck to better observe the airship. Pitt focused the zoom lens of the camera on the men until their faces could clearly be distinguished.
“Recognize any of these characters?” Pitt asked over his shoulder to Dirk and Dahlgren.
The younger Pitt studied the screen for just a moment before gritting his teeth hard. The flash of anger subsided quickly, though, as a contented smile returned to his face.
“The Fu Manchu character standing in the center. His name is Tongju. He's Kang's master of ceremonies for torture and assassination. Appeared to be calling the shots aboard the Odyssey earlier.”
“For such a nice guy, it would be kind of a shame to ruin his Mexican vacation,” Giordino replied.
As he spoke, he dipped the prow of the blimp down and held steady as the airship slowly dove toward the water. When it looked like he was going to drive the nose into the sea, Giordino gently pulled up on the controls, leveling the gondola just fifty feet above the water. The Icarus had closed the gap between the two vessels during the dive, and Giordino guided the airship along the port side of the tender until the gondola was suspended side by side.
“You want to step off and have a beer with these guys?” Pitt asked as he eyed the men on the boat just a few dozen feet away.
“No, just want to let them know that they ain't going to outrun Mad Al and his Magic Bag of Gas,” he grinned.
Giordino eased back on the throttles until he matched speeds with the bouncing tender, the large envelope of the blimp casting a shadow over the topsides of the boat. Above the din of the tender's twin inboard engines and the airship's Porsche motor-driven propellers, the men in the Icarus suddenly detected an unwelcome staccato. Glancing back at the tender, Pitt saw that Tongju and the two commandos had retrieved automatic weapons and were standing on the stern deck blasting away at the blimp.
“I hate to be the one to tell you but they're shooting holes in your gasbag, Mad Al,” Pitt said.
“The jealous lowlifes,” Giordino replied, goosing the throttles.
Before departing Oxnard, they had been told that the airship could withstand a profusion of holes and gashes to the air bags and still retain its lift. Tongju and his men would have to exhaust a crate of ammunition to threaten the airworthiness of the helium-filled blimp. But the safety of the gondola was less assured. After a momentary pause in the firing, the floor of the main cabin suddenly erupted in a spray of splinters as the gunmen redirected their weapons at the gondola.
“Everybody down!” Pitt yelled as a burst of fire smashed the side cockpit window, the bullets grazing just over his head. The sound of shattering glass resonated through the cabin as a rain of bullets poured into the gondola. Dirk and Dahlgren lay flat on the floor as several bursts stitched past them and into the ceiling above. Giordino jammed the throttles all the way forward, and, while waiting anxiously for the blimp to speed ahead, turned the yoke full to port to turn away from the tender.
“No,” Pitt yelled at him, “turn and fly over him.”
Giordino knew not to question Pitt's judgment and, without hesitation, threw the rudder over in the opposite direction, pushing the Icarus back toward the tender. Glancing at Pitt, he could see him studying the tender below with an arched brow. The blistering fire continued to tear into the gondola for a second, then abruptly stopped as Giordino steered the gondola above and slightly ahead of the tender's cabin roof, temporarily obscuring the field of fire.
“Everyone all right?” Pitt asked.
